Winner made me fall in love with the festival
It took a victory in a 1992 chase for Marcus Armytage to really appreciate the splendour of Cheltenham
That flicked a switch in me and ever since I have never been able to get enough of the meeting
Next week’s Cheltenham Festival seems to get bigger and bigger. Any bigger and it will start blotting out the sun. Cheltenham in its post-modern form is more of everything; more anticipated, more valuable, more important to the racing industry either side of the Irish Sea, more fashionable, more successful, more hyped, more pressure, more compelling and more expensive.
Arguably though, with so many races to choose for each horse these days, the only thing which is less is the competition. Next week five favourites, Buveur d’air, Apple’s Jade, Samcro, Altior and Laurina, will be sent off odds-on, although experience tells us that the biggest certainty is at least one of them will get beaten.
However, if you needed any proof that it is now an event beyond horse racing, a week today Chris Evans is taking his Radio 2 breakfast show with its 10million listeners to Jonjo O’neill’s yard at Jackdaws Castle for a live broadcast on the morning of the Gold Cup – he doesn’t do that for the snooker.
But with the build-up strewn with hyperbole and the handbrake not working on expectation management, there comes a potential problem: it has to keep raising its game in terms of the action and drama or there comes a point where it will struggle to live up to the hype and its only success will be in being disappointing.
When I started riding, I was always an Aintree man. In those days, the two meetings were equals. I dare say plenty shared my view back in the 1980s, and I never truly got Cheltenham until I rode Tug Of Gold to win the 1992 Kim Muir Chase for the late David Nicholson. That flicked a switch in me though and ever since I have never been able to get enough of Cheltenham.
The grey, an 11-1 shot, was going so badly at the top of the hill I would have pulled him up if it had been at Southwell but he flew down it, led at the last and won by a length and a half.
Even though most people had retreated to the bar by then I felt as if I was 7ft tall returning to the weigh-in. The next day I was riding Keep Talking, the 5-2 favourite and considered by many the banker of the meeting, in the four-mile National Hunt Chase, and in front for the last circuit I only had an escort of loose horses for company. After two in two days I was 8ft tall. I should have won the National Hunt Chase three years on the trot. In 1993 I rode Claxton Green for Martin Pipe. He jumped right-handed the whole way, losing a length at every fence, and was still only beaten a shorthead by Usher’s Island, a subsequent Whitbread Gold Cup winner. A year later I was on Christmas Gorse, the brother of Grand National winner Party Politics, for Nick Gaselee.
I was told to produce him late. The best thing about that victory was when my mother turned to my sister in the grandstand as we were setting off for the last circuit with Christmas Gorse in 13th about 15 lengths behind the leaders. “The little ----er [a term of endearment in our family] has gone to sleep,” she said. Au contraire. Even aged 30 there was delight to be taken in proving your mummy wrong.
I also had my fair share of spills there. A year after Christmas Gorse I fell at the fifth. My then Daily Telegraph colleague Jim Mcgrath was commentating and, to make sure the racing editor knew I was still good for some copy, he devoted most of the commentary between the fifth and the sixth fences to the apparently vigorous state of my health as I walked away after falling at the front of 20 runners.